Parplar

"It is probably easiest to call Larkin Grimm a folk singer, but doing that fails to capture just how difficult she is to pin down ... When she's not full of (...) infectious defiance, she is all wide-eyed joy. Her take on the traditional "Fall on Your Knees" insists that you stomp on the floor. "My Justine" is a convergence of any stringed instrument you can think of, and they ride a rocky road under Grimm as her vocals rise to the astral plane. Throughout the record, Portland, Maine collective Fire on Fire back up Grimm, and their loose, spaced out folk is the perfect background for Grimm's earthen sound. And while you might be inclined to throw her into the freak-folk movement, what she's doing taps naturally into something much older, something distinctly southern, that she brought with her down from her childhood Appalachia. The sound of Parplar is not one that Grimm found and latched onto. It is a sound that lives deep in her blood. It is the only sound she could make,andshe does it brilliantly".

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"Over the course of several self-released albums, Larkin Grimm has carved a niche for herself among the freak-folk contingent - as an actual freak. In most cases, that's an ill-fitting, derisive label for today's folk revivalists. But Grimm, who was born in a Memphis commune, looks like a Dolce & Gabbana model, writes lyrics so raw they'd make Peaches blush, and cultivates a pagan earth mother/witch persona, would be unlikely to argue with it. As much as her public self and acoustic guitar-based music reveal genuine eccentricity (would Michael Gira have signed her to his Young God label otherwise?), Grimm is Yale-educated, well-traveled and no feral naïf. Indeed, her reworking of folk traditions and the roles women play in them share core concerns and strategies with early academic feminists and the deconstructive fiction of Angela Carter, who famously re-injected blood/sugar/sex/magic into the fairy tales of those other, Victorian, Grimms. As with Carter's fiction,Grimm'smusic, particularly in her latest, Parplar, can be wondrous and wildly inventive, as well as self-indulgent and, well, kinda icky".

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"Parplar might be in some ways a folk record, or at least a folky singer/songwriter one. But if so, it's at the freakiest margins of those genres - not in a distasteful outsider way, but in a pretty impressive and certainly very eclectic one. A major aspect of that eclecticism is the sheer number of instruments employed (...) but the most important element of the music (...) is Grimm's voice, which (...) can get almost as accessible as some of Joni Mitchell or Phoebe Snow's work, or as weird as some of the odder early 21st century acid folk. Never settling into predictable moods, there's something for a wide range of adventurous folk and rock fans here, whether the near alt-country folk of some tunes; the "Ghost Riders in the Sky"-like "Ride That Cyclone"; the haunting classical chamber music-tinged aura of some tracks; the reserved and remote starkness of "They Were Wrong," which might be most in line with what many underground female folk vocalists were offering aroundthisera; or the sheer eccentric whimsy of "How to Catch a Lizard," whose weirdness is in the Holy Modal Rounders' league".

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